Hewlett-Packard (HP) has strengthened its mobile presence with news that it has acquired Seattle-based music streaming service Melodeo. HP hasn’t disclosed the purchase price, but Melodeo investors have put more than US$19 million into the company and TechCrunch claims the deal is worth between US$30 million and US$35 million. Melodeo claims to offer “an all-in-one mobile music system” provided to mobile operators, and counts Alltel, AT&T, Rogers, 3, China Unicom, TDC and KTF as customers. The Seattle Times cites an HP spokesperson as stating that “Melodeo is one of the only companies with technology to aggregate a consumer’s digital media, manage it in the cloud and stream it to the user on any device, along with additional streams of content.” Melodeo’s two main products are nuTsie (an anagram of iTunes) and Mobilcast.

HP’s move will pit it against Apple’s Lala service, as well as Spotify and Pandora. Although the financial size of the deal is not huge (given that HP is the world’s largest PC manufacturer), it is HP’s strategic decision to enter the mobile music space that is the biggest surprise. In April HP also caused a stir by announcing its intention to buy smartphone vendor and software platform Palm for US$1.2 billion.